Most businesses have a section on their website for non-product-related material, whether it’s presented as ‘company news’, a ‘blog’ or whatever. All businesses should have something. If nothing else, they nearly always bring in unexpected search engine visits, which mount up over the years and can often be very commercially useful ones.
However, the material that goes into the blog/news section can often be haphazard. So how do we make it work more effectively?
The first step is to understand what we’ve got, and how it’s performing. Our website visitor analytics can tell us which blog pages are bringing in search engine traffic, and Google Search Console can tell us how and why visitors got there. That exercise on its own might provide some ideas for new and better content.
Convert blog visitors to enquirers
If visitors arrived via searches that indicate they might be customers for specific products or services, it’s important to ensure the page features a great call-to-action directing them to the latest relevant content on those products or services. For example, a blog page presenting a video on ‘how to calibrate a blue widget’ is wasted without a prominent link at the end directing viewers to ‘find out more about our easy-to-calibrate blue widgets here’.
Another improvement exercise might be to decide which blog/news posts are being read, and which are just historic artefacts that are simply not contributing any longer. Pages can be updated, or retired and the URL redirected.
Google Search Console might also suggest searches that an existing blog post could be addressing better. If we rewrite something, there’s no reason why it can’t be re-dated and moved to the top of the ‘latest posts’ list. A top tip for this would be to introduce some more internal links to the page, perhaps from product pages.